Today I did a wedding!  There was much to reflect upon in the experience...but mostly I thought about how in that moment, between those two souls, the love they had for each other was everything.  It was beyond space and time.  

This led be to the following New Church Life article on the same by Rev. Grant Odhner.  As you reflect on the teachings presented, may you be inspired to think about those moments in your life that similarly transcend a sense of time and space.

Love and Peace,

Ethan

 [God] is not in time. Time is something that was Divinely introduced into our world so that we might have a starting place and an identity. Finite minds need time, or at least progression, in order to have a sense of participation in the Lord's life. Think of it! What would a loving relationship mean unless we had met the other person in time and had chosen to pursue the relationship and had grown with it through time? 

The Lord wants us to enjoy Divine love in relationships. That is the goal. Time is one of the things Divinely created in order to provide for that.  But the love itself is eternal, not in time. The Heavenly Doctrines of the New Church invite us to see the distinction between time and mental states. We read:
     

Insofar as [a person's] state is one of affection and therefore of joy, or insofar as it is one of thought and thus of absence from the body, they are outside time. For while such a state lasts, many hours seem to the person to be as scarcely one hour. The reason for this is that mental states belong to the internal person, which is their spirit (Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven 3356).
    

An incredible number of things can happen in just a few minutes of dreaming, because in dreams we are in a purely mental world.  With the Lord there isn't even any progression. All is now.
     

This grand perspective could make us lose our sense of connection with the Lord. But wait!  [The Divine] is still "near" to us-in fact, all the "nearer" on account of not being bound by time, and knows each of us intimately. His eyes are always on our absolute potential for receiving Divine Love and Wisdom. He is not disappointed by our clumsy and slow progress, or worried that we have failed for the thousandth time, or that we will fail a thousand more times.  (All these emotions stem from being stuck at a point in time or progression.) 

Indeed, [the Lord] is not anxious if we choose evil.  The Lord sees us apart from time. And works calmly in time and into time to bring about what He sees we will choose-whether this choice is at the highest level of receiving Divine life or at the lowest.
     

I'm not sure it's possible for us to understand how the Lord can experience joy apart from time. Time and "process" are so important to the way we find joy and happiness. Yet I think we can all recognize that at the moment when we feel the mercy of His love through a kind friend's forgiveness, at the moment in which we experience wise insight, at the moment when we are deeply affected by something innocent and precious, the Lord is present. And the way we then feel knows no time.